William Tweed: Rim Fire's effect will be with us for a very long time

Like just about everyone else these days, I'd like to weigh in on the meaning of the huge wildfire that has been burning in the Central Sierra Nevada since Aug. 17.

The Rim Fire began on that day on the Stanislaus National Forest and soon spread into Yosemite National Park as well. The total area burned has now risen into the hundreds of square miles. In addition to the direct effects of the fire, extensive clouds of smoke drifted hundreds of miles during the early part of the event, affecting even towns as far away as Reno.

Tragically, for those who follow such things, this fire came as no surprise. Two successive dry winters, a century of unrealistic forest management, and the continuing effects of climate change combined to make the fire essentially inevitable. The only question was exactly when and where it would start.

I wrote as much in my column for May 11, remarking that our Sierra forests are in "deep trouble" and that "this is likely to be the summer when we begin to see how climate change is going to redesign the forests of the Sierra Nevada."

It didn't take rocket science on my part to make such forecasts. We humans have taken a predictable occurrence (two dry winters in a row) and made the situation immeasurably worse by both shortsighted forest management and our determination to live well now even at the cost of changing the earth's climate.

The forests that have been burning as a part of the Rim Fire during the past few weeks have been designated as either national forest or national park for more than a century. Both types of areas, unfortunately, have been managed all too often to match our shortsighted expectations and needs rather than with consideration for how they actually work.

On the national forests, a combination of aggressive logging and persistent fire suppression has led to forests choked with flammable vegetation. Decades of science document these changes.

In Yosemite National Park, the situation is only a little better. Since the park does not allow logging, these forests did not see as large a shift toward thickets of younger trees, but a long-time policy of fire suppression also increased national park fuels before it came to an end in the last third of the twentieth century.

In the 1970s, national park managers began to experiment with forest-thinning fires to reduce fuels, but national forest managers were much slower to move in that direction. In more recent times, both systems have recognized the need for reducing fuels by thinning forests, but federal dollars for that sort of work have proven hard to get. Instead, we pay for wildfires.

One wonders what could have been done to reduce the fire threat, where the Rim Fire has been burning for nearly a month, if we had spent the money we are now using to control the fire to thin the forest before it ignited? This year, of course, things are going the opposite way. The Forest Service is, in fact, draining money away from its forest thinning programs to fight wildfires. What choice does it have?

Climate change intensifies all this. A warmer climate makes for longer fire seasons and even drier forests in late summer. These changes have made the Rim Fire even worse.

And there's more. In my May 11 column, I worried that "in areas where the forest is badly damaged this summer by fires, the changing climate is likely to make it difficult to re-establish the same sort of forests that grew there previously."

Tragically, I still have every reason to believe that this will turn out to be true. It will take decades to know the full environmental costs of an event like the Rim Fire, but I suspect that in many areas it will turn out to be what vegetation scientists call a "stand-changing event." By this, we mean an event that results in a different kind of forest for the foreseeable future.

In a warmer and drier Sierra, major parts of the conifer forest consumed by the Rim Fire will likely come back as something else, most likely highly flammable brush and oak. Such a change will be an enormous loss to California.

Can we expect fires of this magnitude in Tulare County? The answer, quite simply, is yes. The southern Sierra is just as likely to see huge, stand-changing fires as any other part of the Sierra, and we ought to consider them to be an inevitable part of our near-term future.

Sooner or later (and I wouldn't necessarily bet on later) the combination of cyclical dry weather, past land management, and climate change will ignite a local fire that will burn hundreds of square miles of Tulare County forest. This is the path we have chosen.

Three Rivers resident William Tweed writes about the natural world of Tulare County. His column, copyrighted and printed by permission, appears every other week in Paths to Peaks.

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William Tweed: Rim Fire's effect will be with us for a very long time

Like just about everyone else these days, I'd like to weigh in on the meaning of the huge wildfire that has been burning in the Central Sierra Nevada since Aug. 17.

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